


Baby Girl

by Dazzledfirestar



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Adoption, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Established Relationship, Kid Fic, M/M, background ship (Jemma/Skye)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-19
Updated: 2014-12-19
Packaged: 2018-03-02 04:21:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,443
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2799407
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dazzledfirestar/pseuds/Dazzledfirestar
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It was a challenge, there was no doubt about that. But after discovering a buried file, the Director of SHIELD and his partner make the right choice for a girl with no name. Or no name she can decide on just yet, at least.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Baby Girl

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ItsLexDuh](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ItsLexDuh/gifts).



Phil knocked on the door jam, a bag full of food in his hand. Nick was grumbling to himself—this time it sounded like something about a level 8 agent whose head must have been so far up their ass they could see dinner coming—as he had been ever since he’d taken over as Director of SHIELD. It turned out the first thing he had to do was get through some of the less than tidy bureaucracy. Phil smiled to himself. If there was one thing Nick hated, it was paper work and now he was up to his ears in it.

“Have you had lunch?”

Nick didn’t lift his head but the general sound of grumbling got a little louder. “This is all bullshit, Phil.”

“Am I cleared to know that?”

“Probably not but I could promote you if you want.” Nick’s eye dropped to the bag in Phil’s hand, his brain obviously cluing into the signs that he was hungry. Probably had been for a while too. “What’d you get?”

“The usual.” Phil shrugged. He took a few steps into the office as he spoke, closing the door behind himself. “Loaded burgers for both of us. Extra mushrooms for you. Fries.” He put the bag down on the only clear spot he could see on the desk. He handed Nick’s burger over the mountains of paper and shook his head. “Maybe you should promote me. Somebody’s going to have to have the clearance to dig you out from under all that.”

“Don’t tempt me.” Nick quickly unwrapped his lunch and took a bite, still sorting through the piles. He frowned and Phil was about to ask if they fucked up the order again—the burgers were great but the service had been spotty for a while—when Nick tossed a file over the desk to him. “Check that out… something weird there or is it just me?”

“It’ probably just you.” Phil wiped his hands and set his own burger down before picking it up. It was Level 8 and for a second he considered telling Nick he couldn’t look at this. But that was the upside of being the Director, he guessed. He understood the frown pretty quickly. “How deep was this buried?”

“Deep enough that I almost missed it in the mess here.” Nick sighed and sat back. Obviously the wheels were turning already. “Looks like it wasn’t meant to be found.”

“She wasn’t meant to be found you mean.”

“That too.”

“So what are we going to do about it?” From the information in the file, something clearly needed to be done as far as Phil was concerned. “You know if she actually is gifted, we’re looking at a supervillain origin story if they keep bouncing her around like that.”

“Maybe.” Nick ran a hand over his face. “But looking at the trail of bodies, I’m not sure what else to do for her.”

“She’s six, Nick.”

“I know, Phil.”

“Nick…”

“I know what you’re thinking. I… Jesus, Phil come on. We can’t—“ He sighed again and went back to his burger. By the time he was finished eating, Phil was still sifting through the file. “You really want to do this?”

“Somebody has to.”

“Guess we’re better equipped to deal than most…”

“She needs help, Nick.” Phil put the file down gingerly. “Somebody has to be there for that kid or we’ll be dealing with her all over again in twenty years in a far less pleasant way.” Phil smiled down at the picture of a small child in a playground. “Nick, come on.”

“We’re going to be horrible parents.”

“That’s a yes, isn’t it?”

“It’s a maybe. We’ll… look into it.”

Phil nodded, still going through the file. He frowned at the name the orphanage had given the girl but he’d do a little more digging on that. Maybe he could find out what she’d like to be called instead. “This is a good idea.”

“This is the worst idea we’ve ever had.”

“You’re a pessimist.” Phil smiled and got up, walking around the desk and pressing a quick kiss to Nick’s lips. Usually he didn’t risk it at work but talking about adopting a little girl rated a kiss, he was sure. “I’ve got a feeling.”

“Of course you do.”

~*~*~*~*~

“I’m not tired!”

The pout on her face was impressive and might have worked on a lesser man. Hell, it was almost working on Phil as it was but Nick scooped her up and spun her around before settling her in his arms on the couch. “I know you’re not, Skye.”

“Daisy.”

“What?”

“I heard a song the other day and I thought I knew it.” She shrugged. “I wanna try Daisy for now. If it doesn’t work, then Skye… or both. Can I have a middle name?” She smiled up at Nick. She’d lost a tooth recently and the gap there only intensified the adorable little grin. “Pleeeeease?”

Phil chuckled. They’d been over the name issue so many times in the last year. They’d lucked out with her teacher at her new school so far in that they didn’t mind her switching names and trying to figure out what she liked. They’d kept ‘Poots’ as her last name for the time being but he was hoping she’d change her mind about that too. “You can be both or neither or whatever you want, baby.”

Nick smiled down at her and nodded. “You can have all the names you want.”

“No Mary Sue though.” She made a face and a rather unpleasant noise that said exactly how she felt about the name the nuns had given her.

“Of course not, baby.” Phil sat down next to them, wrapping them both in a quick hug. “You think about it overnight, okay?”

“You’re trying to get me to sleep.” She pouted again.

“Yes we are.” Nick chuckled softly. “We’re tired too.”

“I’m _not_ tired!”

“But _we_ are!” Nick matched her tone and the shocked look on her face said that tactic was starting to work.

“Did you guys save the world today?”

Phil smiled. “Parts of it.” He kissed the top of her head. “Saving the whole world at once isn’t a job for just the two of us.”

She nodded. “You’d need five of you at least.”

“At least.” Nick smiled. “So what do you say you cut us a break and go to bed?”

She rolled her eyes and hopped down out of Nick’s lap. “Fine.” She was half way up the hall when she turned back to peak around the corner. “Can I ask you guys something?”

“Anything.” Phil found himself wondering what the question could possibly be. Things had been going well, despite the challenges of balancing SHIELD with a seven year old but he knew that she’d been bounced around enough to have to ask often if they really meant to keep her.

She chewed on her lip a little; obviously very nervous about this question of hers. “Can I call you guys my dads?”

Phil got up, wrapping his arms around the girl and giving her a huge hug. “Yeah. You can.” He felt Nick at his back and smiled. “If you want to.”

“I do.” She smiled. “I like your names but… I want you to be my dads.” She shrugged a little and hugged Phil back. “I want to stay here.”

“We’re not going anywhere, baby.” Nick said softly. “And neither are you.”

“Can I have both your names though?”

“I think we can swing that.”

“I want to be Daisy Skye Coulson Fury.” She grinned and slipped out of the hug. “Or Skye Daisy Coulson Fury… I haven’t worked that out yet.” She thought about it for a moment longer. “I’ll sleep on it.”

They both watched as she ran up the hall and into her room. “And you thought this was a bad idea.” Phil smiled up at Nick.

“Okay, I was wrong.” Nick crouched down, pressing a kiss to Phil’s lips. “You were right.”

Phil stood, pulling Nick up with him and kissing him with a little more heat than before. “Of course I was.” He kissed him again, intent on spending a good deal of the evening kissing his partner.

Skye-Daisy seemed to have other ideas. Her voice echoed down the hall way before things could go much further. “EWWWWW! Kissing’s gross!”

Nick laughed and shook his head. “You going to have the taser ready for when she changes her mind on that?”

“Oh, hell yes.”

~*~*~*~

“I don’t know whether to ground her or take her out for ice cream.”

“You’re the one that insisted on the top of the line laptop.”

“I didn’t think she’d hack US!” Nick put his head back against the wall for a minute. “She’s 14!”

“We could… send her to a couple courses at the academy…” Phil hated the idea of bringing Skye—it was Skye at the moment—into SHIELD. He didn’t want her to have to deal with the shit they had to deal with but given the skill set she seemed to be developing all on her own as she got older, it was seeming more and more inevitable.

“Not yet.” Nick sighed and shook his head, obviously exhausted. “I just don’t want to have to lock up our daughter for this shit.”

“Did you tell her that?”

“Of course.”

“Did you tell her that while you were still pissed off?”

“No.” Nick leaned forward, pulling his knees up and resting his head on them. “I gave us both time to cool down. She says she gets it. But that’ll only last until she gets bored again.”

“I know.” Phil sighed and ran his hand slowly up and down Nick’s back. “It’s normal though, right? Pushing boundaries. It’s not her fault our boundaries are a little more… national security related than most parents.” Phil smiled and he felt the laugh work its way out of Nick. “I’ll talk to her about the courses. Maybe that’ll help with the boredom.”

“Okay. That doesn’t mean she has to—“ Nick shook his head and looked up at Phil. He obviously felt the same way Phil did about her joining SHIELD. “Okay.”

Her reaction when Phil took her out for lunch the next day didn’t really help ease his mind. Her eyes lit up and she almost bounced in her seat. “Can I take some self-defense classes while I’m there? I want to—“

“Skye… one step at a time, okay?”

She pouted a little and he was vividly reminded of the little seven year old girl that never wanted to go to bed. “Dad… please?”

“We’ll see.”

“I just… want to save the world. I don’t want you and Papa to do it alone. I want to help!” She sounded so earnest about it too. “I can help!”

“I know, baby.” He sighed and patted her hand. “I know you can. Just… one step at a time.” Phil sat back and watched as she attacked her lunch. Bacon cheese burger. Extra mushrooms just like her papa. He smiled. “Next time you want to hack a government agency, don’t pick ours, okay?”

“Okay.” She nodded, wiping a drip of sauce off her face. “So… CIA then?”

“Oh, aim higher than that.” Phil smirked.

~*~*~*~

He wasn’t quite ready for this. Neither, it seemed, was Nick. But she was smiling and happy and graduating from the SHIELD Communications Academy far earlier than most. Things looked like they were going smoothly across the board and while he knew it wasn’t going to last forever, Phil was enjoying the relative peace and normality of it all. Stark was behaving himself. Banner hadn’t had an incident in ages. They kept hearing that they were this close to finding Captain America and no aliens had shown up recently. Life was good.

“I met somebody.” She grinned. “She’s Sci-Tech.”

“That’s great baby.” Nick smiled but Phil could see the worry forming already. Most people didn’t know who Skye was. Not really. She’d registered for the Academy as Daisy Skye Johnson—taking her last name from Nick’s mother, and technically Nick before he’d discovered his own family history—to avoid any of the obvious entanglements that could come with being the daughter of the Director of SHIELD. “Who is…?”

“She.” Skye blushed a little. “She’s a doctor. Bio-chem stuff. She’s British.”

“Does this ball of wonderful have a name?”

“Jemma.” She grinned and Phil couldn’t help but notice it was a similar look to the one he used to get when talking about Nick. That was a good sign. 

“You know,” Phil started slowly, “If you’re going to be a field agent, relationships—“

She rolled her eyes and nodded slowly. “Are tough, yeah, yeah. I know. Long distance. Blah, blah, blah. But I really like her, Dad.”

Nick put a hand on her shoulder. “Well then, do the best you can.”

“You guys did it.” She raised an eyebrow at both of them. It was an obvious challenge.

“That is true.” Phil smiled. “Do we get to meet her?”

Skye smirked at him. “Maybe. If you promise to behave yourself.”

Nick rolled his eyes and chuckled. Phil shook his head. “We promise we won’t scare off your new girlfriend.” And he found he actually meant it. They’d known this day would come eventually. When they’d have to let her go out into the world knowing they did their best by her. They’d trained her to think for herself. To be creative. To defend herself and those that couldn’t do it for themselves. They had taught her to be a good person even if that meant bucking the odds. 

They’d done their best but a bit of doubt was left in the back of his mind. The trail of death that followed a baby girl from China to America to an orphanage and back again… he wondered again if they’d done the right thing by shielding her from that.

But it was out of their hands. She was going to be a field agent and if something was after her, they’d trust that she could deal with it. She’d have a team behind her after all. A good one.

Phil was making sure of that. He’d keep an eye on her officially for a little while. She’d have a good SO with Melinda. He knew that but that didn’t mean he wasn’t going to stay close for the first couple missions at least. If Nick pulled any strings to make that happen, well… he was the Director and that was his prerogative. 

After all, she was their baby girl.


End file.
